Archive for November, 2017

In the course of automation, you might need to validate credentials that a script would use to perform a set of complex tasks before the script is run. The Validate-WindowsCredential and Validate-LinuxCredential PowerShell functions are two of the latest additions to the SB-Tools PowerShell module that simplify this task.

Validate-WindowsCredential

The Validate-WindowsCredential function/cmdlet takes 2 parameters:

‘Credential’ which is a PSCredential object that can be obtained from the Get-Credential cmdlet of the Microsoft.PowerShell.Security, or the Get-SBCredential function of the SB-Tools PS module.

‘Session’ which is a PSSession object that can be obtained via the New-PSSession cmdlet of the Microsoft.PowerShell.Core

Similarly, TRUE is returned if authentication is successful or FALSE if authentication fails.

It also displays additional information to the console such as the account hash.

Unlike the Validate-WindowsCredential cmdlet, the Validate-LinuxCredential cmdlet relies on reading and parsing the /etc/shadow file that has the hashes of user accounts of this Linux machine. The current revision of the cmdlet is designed to validate MD5 hashed accounts only. A possible enhancement is to add functionality to validate accounts hashed with other algorithms such as Blowfish and SHA